Witnesses were seen entering the courthouse to appear before the panel which is looking into the 46-year-old murder.

Neither federal nor local authorities would comment on the Grand Jury.

The U.S. Attorney's office in Louisiana's Western District announced in 2009 that the Concordia Parish District Attorney's Office would become involved in the Morris investigation. At that time, former U.S. Attorney Donald Washington of Lafayette said the probe would eventually include the appointment of a federal attorney as an assistant district attorney in Concordia.

The Sentinel has learned that a DOJ attorney appeared before the Grand Jury on Tuesday.

Morris, 51, an African-American, died Dec. 14, 1964, four days after his shoe shop was torched by at least two men. Before he died, Morris told authorities that he saw two men outside the shop on the night of the arson. He said one had a shotgun, the other a gasoline can. He also said he glimpsed another man and a car in the alley beside his shop.

Morris said the man with the shotgun prevented his exit from the front of the shop while the man with the gasoline can ignited the shoe shop with what appeared to be a match.

The FBI investigated Morris' death in the 1960s and reopened the case in 2007. Authorities viewed the murder as a civil rights case.

The killing is one of more than 100 civil rights era murders the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI have reviewed. About half of these cases have since been closed for various reasons, according to DOJ.

According to investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., 29 arrests involving killings from the civil rights era have been made since 1989. Of that total, he said 24 convictions have been recorded, the most recent being that of James Bonard Fowler for the 1965 killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Alabama.

Cynthia Deitle, chief of the FBI's Civil Rights Unit, said in a statement to The Sentinel in January that Morris' murder was "one of the most horrific and troubling of all the FBI's Civil Rights era Cold Cases."

The Sentinel reported last month that a 71-year-old Rayville man was implicated in the arson by the man's son, ex-wife and ex-brother-in-law. The three identified the man as Arthur Leonard Spencer.

The son, William "Boo" Spencer of Rayville, and ex-brother-in-law, Bill Frasier of Minden, said Spencer told them about his involvement, while Spencer's ex-wife, Brenda Rhodes of Minden, said another Klansman implicated Spencer in the arson.

The three said the Klansmen did not expect Morris to be in the shoe shop that night.

Spencer, who told The Sentinel he was a Klan member in Richland Parish in the 1960s, denied any involvement in the Morris arson and denied knowing the other Klansman implicated.

Neither the FBI nor DOJ would comment on Spencer.

According to FBI documents, Morris was targeted for attack by the Ferriday-Clayton Unit of the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan on a number of complaints, most alleging that Morris was flirting or dating white women. Natchez Klan leader E.L. McDaniel, an FBI informant in 1967, told the bureau he was asked by a Ferriday-Clayton Original Knights' leader to authorize a Mississippi hit squad -- known as a wrecking crew -- to whip Morris for allegedly flirting with white women.

But according to Klansman O.C. "Coonie" Poissot, the other Klansman implicated in the Morris arson by Spencer's ex-wife and ex-brother-in-law, the arson was triggered when Concordia Parish sheriff's deputy Frank DeLaughter quarreled with Morris over a pair of cowboy boots. Poissot, an FBI informant who died in the 1990s, and another informant, told the bureau in 1967 that Morris informed DeLaughter he would no longer repair the deputy's cowboy boots for free.

FBI documents provided by the Syracuse College of Law Cold Case Justice Initiative indicate that DeLaughter was furious with Morris over the encounter. The FBI concluded in 1967 that it was likely the arson was triggered by this confrontation.

In 1964, Frank Morris suffered fatal burns from an arson.The FBI launched two investigations into Morris's death in the 1960s, but the case was never solved. In 2007, newspaper editor Stanley Nelson picked up the case. His reporting led him to suspect Arthur Leonard Spencer, a Richland Parish truck driver and former member of the Ku Klux Klan.

James Buford Goss was calm by the time he talked to Vidalia's police chief at the old Concordia Parish Courthouse on the morning of Friday, July 10, 1964. He had been furious the night before. Goss told the chief that Joseph "Joe-Ed" Edwards, a black porter at the Shamrock Motel, had assaulted his close friend Iona Perry, a 22-year-old white woman who worked as a registration clerk at the motel. He said Edwards had grabbed the arms of Perry, who suffered from a crippling disease, and kissed her against her will.

J.D. Richardson found himself in the crossfire of Klansmen and the Mafia over the operation of the Morville Lounge in 1965 and 1966. By late 1966 he felt he had lost control of his own property, was being pressured by the FBI for information on lounge operations, complained that his life had been threatened on several occasions and reported that arsonists may have been responsible for the destruction of his home.

Two daughters of a man who was a Concordia Parish Klansman in the mid-1960s have different views of their father, one of the FBI's top informants in the 1964 murder of Ferriday shoe shop owner Frank Morris and other Klan violence.

Frank Morris and James White Sr. were best friends, so close that some folks believed the two were related though they were not. White, now dead, had experienced confrontations with Klansmen during the months preceding Morris' murder, his children recall. Once, when a Klansman opened fire on White in his own front yard, his children say White fired back and felt certain that he wounded one of his attackers.

The night of the arson of Frank Morris' shoe shop in 1964 was a busy one for 17-year-old Delbert Matthews, who recalls working alone at the Coast Service Station near the outskirts of Ferriday. The station was just two blocks south of the shoe shop along U.S. Hwy. 84. Matthews remembers several specific things about the night -- a young black man hiding under the desk at the service station, and a white stranger in a green car with Franklin County, Miss., tags, talking to deputy Frank DeLaughter.

A short time after Frank Morris died as a result of the arson of his shoe shop, two black men were run out of Ferriday because the Klan and sheriff's deputies feared they could identify the men who killed Morris.